***Miniature Wood Gasifier*** Chit Chat Discuss ***Miniature Wood Gasifier*** in the General forums; lost the post I made last night,, Here it is again, Made another experiment tonight... a 1 qt. paint can, ...

[ThisOldGarageNJ]

lost the post I made last night,, Here it is again, Made another experiment tonight... a 1 qt. paint can, some plumbing supplies and some fire.. Here is my updated wood gasification system...(great name for a paint can with pipe) This thing burned on its own for about 15 minutes.... It was very cool,...

pic 1, paint can full of wood chunks.
pic 2, after 2-3 mins in the chiminea, right on the coals starting to make gas
pic 3 , the gas burning

Love to hear your thoughts
Cheers
Mark

[shuboyje]

Why not wrap the exhaust back under the retort and use it to make the reaction self sustaining? That is the best part about Pyrolysis to me, once it get's going it is self sustaining.

Now a safety note. The other day I decided to scale up a previous experiment. Scale up being the key phrase. What went well with maybe a 1/2 cup of oil turned into a raging fireball as tall as my garage with a 1/2 gallon. Needless to say I had to take the hose to my experiment, so I fished out the old apparatus last night and will try it again on the smaller scale. The funny thing is I almost did the experiment in my oven, after I had to put it out, I mentioned to my brother in law that if we HAD done it in the oven, we would be eating pizza right now, lol.

[ThisOldGarageNJ]

shu,
im not sure i understand,,, Your saying run the pipe back under the can and lay the pipe in the fire,, or ??

[shuboyje]

A picture is worth a thousand words right? LOL



Obviously these are much larger, they are actually used to make charcoal for a forge, but the concept is the same. What you have is a retort, and in it you have a pyrolysis reaction happening. The cool thing about this reaction is once you get the reaction started(by getting the temperature high enough, for oil I've found this to be about 800F) it can be made self sustaining by routing the exhaust gases back under the retort and using them to keep the temperature in the range it needs to be. So done like this, once you have ignited gas coming out the exhaust, you could actually remove the retort from the fire and it would keep going, and when it stops, you know the reaction is done and all your biomass(wood in this case) has been converted to char and all the volatiles(the flamable exhaust gases) have been driven off.

[ThisOldGarageNJ]

so you would still be able to use the gasses ? just their heat keeps it going ? Sorry Im just having a tuff time getting my brain around this, As for tonights episode, I made a sawdust stove out of a big tin can, You cut small hole in the bottom, put a pipe in horizantally and vertically and pack sawdust around them,, remove slowly and Instant sawdust stove, I lit it with a propane torch and right now its boiling water...

[shuboyje]

If you want to use the gas for something that is a different story. As I said before, right now you have a retort. Unless you want the gas for some reason, or want the char for some reason, it isn't doing you any good making gas cause it is costing you fuel to generate the heat to make the gas. The gas it is currently making is flammable, but it is very dirty and full of tars, you wouldn't want to run a engine on it for instance, and although you can burn it for heat that doesn't make much sense considering you are already generating heat to generate the gas.

This is where full blown gasification comes in. The pyrolysis happening in your retort is the first step of gasification. Next, a gasifier exposes the char and the volatile gases to oxygen together. The heat from the burning volatiles drives a reaction between the char, oxygen, and water vapor which creates Carbon Monoxide and Hydrogen. This is the gas that they run engines on. Again, like pyrolysis, this is a self sustain reaction once it get's going so long as it has something generating airflow through it, be it a blower, engine, or natural draft.

Hope this helps, I know it took me a long time and a lot of reading to wrap my head around all this.

[ThisOldGarageNJ]

shub,,
Its getting clearer thanks, I do have intention of eventually using the gas to either power a generator or what i've seen even cooler is running it directly to the boiler in the house.. (i know thats a far way off right now) but the eventual goal IS the use of the gas..
Thanks
Mark